Order's important. That doesn't necessarily mean putting people in cuffs.

The “broken windows” policing strategy at the heart of today’s emotionally charged debate on public safety and community relations was born of a foot-patrol experiment in Newark 40 years ago that didn’t actually reduce crime rates.

But it did reduce the fear of crime, and, it was hypothesized, the potential for serious crime to take root and flourish.

What did those foot patrol officers do to fool residents into thinking that their streets were safer than they actually were, and to inspire eminent criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson to propose, in a seminal article of the same name in The Atlantic, the storied strategy that posited that one unrepaired broken window begets more, and many invite serious criminal activity?

Reading the much-discussed but little-understood article, one finds the answer — and, in the process, discovers how far today’s notion of broken windows policing has drifted from the original intent.

In short, the cops kept order. They didn’t necessarily catch muggers or murderers in the act, or track down burglars and car thieves, but they enforced “what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order.”

On one such beat, for example, “Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. . . . If a stranger loitered, (the officer) would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way.”

The strategy succeeded in reducing the fear of crime because, logically, the less one sees of disorder and minor criminality, and the more one sees the police, the safer one feels — a result worth pursuing in its own right.

But how those Newark cops kept order is radically different from how our modern police force is expected to keep order, and that difference is what makes today’s application of broken windows in the nation’s biggest city, well, broken.

Harkening to the era before World War II, when cops were primarily charged with maintaining order, not solving crimes, Kelling and Wilson reminded us that “the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested ‘on suspicion’ or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. ‘Rights’ were something enjoyed by decent folk, and perhaps also by the serious professional criminal, who avoided violence and could afford a lawyer. . . . For centuries, the role of the police as watchmen was judged primarily not in terms of its compliance with appropriate procedures but rather in terms of its attaining a desired objective.”

Kelling and Wilson expected broken windows cops to fulfill this role while acknowledging that the Newark experiment came as the era of the omnipotent street cop yielded to the era of individual rights. In other words, we ceased living in a world where respect for the badge was enough to compel obedience to neighborhood norms.

As they put it, “(S)ometimes what (the officer) did could be described as ‘enforcing the law,’ but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.”

They lamented that, “Over the past two decades, the shift of police from order maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions, provoked by media complaints and enforced by court decisions and departmental orders. As a consequence, the order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals.”

In other words, broken windows policing wasn’t meant to be implemented primarily through arrests and prosecution (the “criminal-apprehension process,” as the authors called it), both because doing so was constitutionally suspect (“The criminal-apprehension process was always understood to involve individual rights, the violation of which was unacceptable because it meant that the violating officer would be acting as a judge and jury — and that was not his job”), and beyond judicial discernment (“No universal standards are available to settle arguments over disorder, and thus a judge may not be any wiser or more effective than a police officer.”)

How, then, were officers expected to impose old-world order in this new world? The problem of youth gangs is offered as an example: “Though the police can obviously make arrests whenever a gang member breaks the law, a gang can form, recruit and congregate without breaking the law. And only a tiny fraction of gang-related crimes can be solved by an arrest; thus, if an arrest is the only recourse for the police, the residents’ fears will go unassuaged. The police will soon feel helpless, and the residents will again believe that the police ‘do nothing.’ What the police in fact do is to chase known gang members out of the project. In the words of one officer, ‘We kick ass.’ ”

Of course, the authors acknowledge, “None of this is easily reconciled with any conception of due process or fair treatment.” More than that, they struggled to construct a means for confining the exercise of extralegal authority to within tolerable limits.

They concede that on the potential for discrimination, “We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question. We are not confident that there is a satisfactory answer except to hope that by their selection, training and supervision, the police will be inculcated with a clear sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority.” This concession applies with equal measure to the potential for abuses of all kinds.

On these terms, New York City’s broken windows strategy is broken on its face because, contrary to Kelling and Wilson’s design, it relies overwhelmingly on arrests and prosecutions. Despite plunging serious crime rates overall, misdemeanor arrests in 2013 were up over 30% from 1994, and the ratio of misdemeanor to felony arrests nearly doubled. The number of summonses and arraignments for violations (lower-level offenses like consuming alcohol in public or bicycling on the sidewalk) also doubled.

Further, the Police Department hasn’t had any more success at articulating manageable discretionary standards than did the architects of the original theory. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton recently expressed frustration over officers too often failing to use “an admonition — ‘move along, you can’t do that,’ ” instead of an arrest.

And so, for all its rhetorical commitment to broken windows policing, New York City’s obsession with low-level arrests is alien to the spirit of that philosophy, and the city has failed to develop a mechanism for preserving order and disinviting serious crime that doesn’t include the sort of extralegal police conduct that courts and communities are no longer willing to tolerate.

Lancman is a member of the New York City Council from Queens. He sits on the Fire and Criminal Justice; Public Safety, and Juvenile Justice committees.